There's a Man With a Gun Over There (31 page)

“I thought I was getting away with something,” I say.

“Nah. You were just kidding yourself, walking around in that uniform with one of those short haircuts thinking you were some kind of hippie and you were really just a guy in the army with a gun. The man over there with a gun.”

Oh yes, I almost forgot: the army got even with Neil Renner for the black armband he wore to the lunch in San Francisco. Unlike the rest of us, Neil was sent to Vietnam.

After the orders were handed out, one of the Green Berets came up to Neil while he stood in a circle of us, telling one of his stories.

“Fuck with us,” the Green Beret said and shoved Neil in the chest, “fuck with us, Renner, and you'll never get out alive. You understand that, Renner? Do the rest of you understand that, too?”

He pointed his finger like a pistol at each of the rest of us standing there.

“Fuck with us, and you'll never get out alive.”

I didn't want to look him up, but I had to, my eyes half-closed as my finger went down the names. He wasn't all that far from Rasmussen:

NEIL P. RENNER
Casualty was on Sep 20, 1970
In QUANG TIN, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE

47.

“
W
e trained those boys at Kent State,” the sergeant said, strutting back and forth in front of us, his thumbs tucked in his utility belt. Goldberg and I and Eastlake and fifteen others are sitting in a classroom at Military Police School, Fort Gordon, Georgia.

“We trained them in how to shoot those hippies. You're not going to read this in any of those Commie newspapers that fool the public, but that was some damn fine shooting. Even got a song out of it. You've heard it, haven't you, all you guys that used to be hippies. ‘For What It's Worth.' Buffalo Spring-field recorded it. I always figured that group was named after the Springfield rifle that killed all the buffalo. Anyway, I fixed that song up for you.”

He flicked on the overhead projector.

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

That man is one badass MP.

That MP is going to be me.

“I'll bet all you hippie assholes know the tune to this one, so I'm going to divide you up into a little MP chorus.”

With that he roughly separated the classroom into quarters, and, at the tops of our lungs, we each shouted out a line of the song:

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware.
That man is one badass MP.
That MP is going to be me.

“I am,” I said to myself, “a long way from Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

“The Colt .45, men. The storied Colt .45,” Sergeant Schumacher said. We trainees sat in bleachers in front of the pistol range.

“The gun was invented to kill Moro tribesmen in the Philippines. Used in close combat it could stop a man cold. The exit wound could tear half your back off.”

He put on his yellow Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses.

“You.” Sergeant Schumacher pointed at Jim Eastlake. “Come here.”

Jim had this mincing kind of walk, and his head moved back and forth as if he were saying no to each step.

“Good. Now stand there and hold this.”

The sergeant pulled a large, beat-up doll out of a bag sitting at his feet. It was about three feet long. One arm was missing, and its eyeballs were gone. It looked like a battered child, but it had been dressed in an embroidered nightgown, with colored stitching around the top and back.

Sergeant Schumacher handed it to Eastlake.

“Here,” he said, straightening Eastlake's arm so he held the doll away from his body. “Just hold it out like this. Don't move.”

The last sentence made Eastlake jerk his head, but he held the doll away from his body as if it were putrid.

Sergeant Schumacher picked up a .45—and then, in one quick motion, rammed an ammunition clip into the grip, chambered a round, and fired into the chest of the doll.

A fine red mist sprayed out from the back of the doll, some of it hitting Eastlake.

This all happened so fast it had the quality of a dream.

“Oh, how awful,” Eastlake yelled and flipped the doll on the ground and jumped back, trying to wipe away the red spray on his fatigue shirt.

He looked stunned and shook his hands, trying to get the fine red dots off.

“I can't take this,” he sobbed.

“You're all right, son. Just a little close-quarter shooting. Nothing to worry about. Why don't you sit down now.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” Eastlake whimpered. He kept shaking his hands.

Eastlake stumbled back to join the rest of us on the bleachers.

“See this?” Sergeant Schumacher held the chest of the doll toward us. It had a small, powder-circled hole in the night-gown. “Now see this.” The back of the doll was a tangle of clothing and plastic, all colored blood red. “The back is gone.”

Eastlake began vomiting, and we moved away from him.

“Come on, son,” Schumacher said, crouching down by where Eastlake bent over throwing up. “Don't take this so seriously.”

He held out the battered doll toward Eastlake. I was several feet away and could smell how rotten the doll was.

“It's just ketchup, son. A freezer bag full of ketchup.”

Eastlake was shivering.

“But it's the army,” Eastlake stuttered. “All this killing.”

“Come on, son. Get in the spirit of things here. It's just cowboys and Indians like you used to play, but now the guns are real.”

Eastlake was gasping.

“Son, it was just a demonstration. Badass MPs don't get upset like this.”

A few days later, Peter Everwine qualified for me on the .45, and my days as an untrained killer began.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

48.

“
Y
ou thought you were a Jew,” Albert Speer says to me in a dream. “It never occurred to you that you might be a Nazi.”

He's standing there in a high-collared gray overcoat. He wears the peaked hat of a German officer. The wind howls. Snow swirls around us. All the color of the scene is washed out except the pale flesh of Albert Speer's face.

“So romantic, the Nazis chasing you. Just like in the movies.” He smiles.

“How could I be a Jew?” I say. “I'm Scotch-Irish. A Methodist from Wisconsin.”

“
Ach, ja
,” he says and shakes his right index finger at me. “I know what happens. The American tourists arrive at Dachau. A short drive from Munich. An afternoon's—how do you say?—getaway. They stand in the one barrack that's left and pronounce it all ‘Unbelievable. Cruel—how could they.'
Ja, ja
. I know. They, of course, would never do anything like this. As they sit down for dinner, they can almost feel the starvation—feel how the Jews must have felt.”

His voice trails off.

“But we know,” he says. “We know about the Indians. We know about the Vietnamese. Now the Iraqis. Who's next? Millions and millions dead. We're watching. You're catching up with us. If I am guilty, you are guilty, too.”

He shakes his index finger in the wind. In the snow.

“
Ja, ja,
you think you're innocent. We'll see, Herr Ryan. We'll see.”

He pulls the tall collar of his gray coat up around his ears to protect them from the snow, which the wind is driving faster and faster.

“Herr Ryan, you must know the novel
Herz der Finsternis
, yes. By Joseph Conrad. How do you say in English:
Heart of Darkness
? A novel about evil. In that book, the people go upriver in Africa and find evil. That is the story. Well, in my story, we were the evil. We were the evil people journeyed to, Herr Ryan. People came to us. We were the heart of darkness. People like you, Herr Ryan, came to Adolf and Hermann and me and the others. We were already there, waiting, and now perhaps you've joined us, yes, in the heart of darkness.”

He grabbed my hand. His touch felt cold, like refrigeration piping. So cold. Sticky cold. He held my hand to his heart. I could feel it. Beating cold sludge. A heart of slurried ice.

49.

T
hen we got our orders for Germany. The Twenty-Second MP Group (Customs). Nobody at MP School knew much about the unit, except that it had plainclothes investigators. No uniforms. That sounded so great, so exciting—the idea that I might be a civilian in Germany, traveling around—my uniform and the army forgotten. I'd get there first and then Jenny would join me once I got settled. A little tour of Europe for the two of us.

I divided my good luck into manila folders and labeled them and filled them with brochures. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. It was going to be my grand tour. I'd be a long, long way from Janesville. I cut out articles on the great French skier Jean-Claude Killy. I had brochures on Paris and London. I picked out the Dansk dishes I liked. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. I said those words over and over. In the world of Jean-Claude Killy and Paris and Dansk there were no guns or dirty wars.

“I'm going to Europe,” I said over and over to myself.

The word sounded ancient and lovely.

Slowly the word “Vietnam” was leaving my brain.

I'd done it: by God, I'd done it. I'd escaped the fucking war. The army—can you believe it?—was making my dreams come true.

Goldberg and I and a bunch of others showed up at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. We slept in a barrack full of transferees. Most of our temporary roommates were on their way to Vietnam, but not us, by God, not us. A few days later we boarded a chartered airliner and flew to Europe, almost the way civilians did.

Once we were seated, I pulled out the manila folders from my briefcase and fingered the titles. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. I could see myself sitting at outdoor cafés. I was smoking Gauloises instead of my usual Winstons. I was drinking a crisp Chablis. It was amazing. I had turned a problem into a solution.

Yes, the army was doing all that for me, for free. For fucking free. I had beaten the system. It was all a nightmare that had turned into a dream.

50.

G
utleut Kaserne
. The US Army Transfer Station in Frankfurt. It roughly translated as Fort Good People. An old German fortress built of red bricks. Oh, look, here it is, a couple of clicks away, on Wikipedia. See it? If you didn't know better, you'd think it was a university. A place of learning.

Clang. Clang. Clang
.

It's six a. m. Someone is walking up and down the aisles of the Tenth Replacement Battalion barrack with a steel pot and spoon.

Clang. Clang. Clang
.

“Fuckers think you're special,” the buck sergeant says as we fall into formation on the cobblestone parade ground in the center of the
Kaserne
. “I want you back out here in two minutes with your toothbrushes.”

Ten minutes later, and we're on our hands and knees scrubbing the cobblestones with our Crest toothpaste.

“I want those stones to shine,” the sergeant yells.